Now there were so many hikers that the trail
took on the aspect of a city park on a summer
Sunday afternoon.
These hikers, all fresh and clean, belonged
to that overwhelming majority of Yosemite's
2,300,000 annual visitors who never leave the
park's amenities. They looked askance at our
ten-day-old beards and filthy Levi's.
I suppose we swaggered a bit, if that is pos
sible in a saddle, and thought ourselves super
ior. But that night, I'll have to admit, the hot
showers and clean clothes and candlelit
dinner at the Ahwahnee Hotel weren't at all
hard to take!
Melodious Name for a Tough Tribe
If you've never seen Yosemite, plan to enter
on State Route 41 from Fresno. You emerge
from the Wawona Tunnel's blackness upon
Discovery View and the classic picture of the
valley, the one captured on a million post
cards. I doubt it has changed much since Maj.
James D. Savage's Mariposa Battalion looked
down from somewhere nearby in 1851. To the
right the wind-tossed ribbons of Bridalveil
Fall leap from a cliff. Beyond loom El Capi
tan (page 774) and Half Dome (page 766), two
of the most photographed granite massifs in
the world. Then, narrowing, the valley twists
northward and is lost behind mighty cliffs.
Below the lookout point's retaining wall,
scores of ground squirrels and electric-blue
Steller's jays, begging for handouts, have de
lighted visitors for years (page 768).
Savage and his men were looking not for
beauty, but for Indians, a tough tribe they had
been sent to round up and put on a reserva
tion. The Indians were Ahwahneechees, rein
forced by stragglers from other tribes, who
came to be known as "Yosemites," from their
name for the grizzly bear, uzumati.
While Savage didn't catch them all in 1851,
the Indians finally were driven from the val
ley. It then became, first, farmland and pas
ture, next a California state park. In 1906 it
was incorporated into the surrounding nation
al park, the third oldest, established in 1890.
I saw one memento of the Indians, but I
don't imagine anybody will ever see it again.
It was a perfect obsidian arrowhead, a tiny
one used for hunting birds. A sensitive friend
with whom I was fishing picked it off the
bottom of the clear-flowing Merced River
but then buried it deep in the bordering mead
ow, saying that he felt it belonged there.
The Yosemites and their modern successors
772